In the Beginning was … what?

Editor’s note: The following commentary is condensed from Dr. Schmidt’s book, “And God Created Darwin: the Death of Darwinism,” Allegiance Press, 2001, p.207, and from the text of his forthcoming book, “First They Want Our Children: How Darwinists Seek to Rule our Schools,” Allegiance Press, 2002.

If apes truly were ancestral to human beings – as Darwinian evolutionists claim – at what point in time was the soul inserted into a monkey to make it a man? This single question causes almost half of us to look sideways at the theory of Darwinian evolution. Yet, another question still more seriously confronts this many-challenged theory: How did life originate?

Before evolutionists tell us how undirected species produce wildly different species – birds from dinosaurs, rats from reptiles, us from apes, for example – they must deal with the origins of life, an issue that pales problems of absent fossils, dubious archeological digs and minute changes in finch beaks.

Some Darwinists guess that life arose from either hydrothermal sea vents, volcanoes, lighting strikes or was borne to earth by space trash. Darwin wrote to his friend, J.J. Hooker, that maybe life began in a “warm little pond.” But those answers merely stall the discussion; for locations no more answer the question of origins than knowing where Einstein worked describes the genesis of his genius. A review of the literature reveals the books of evolutionists to be strangely silent about arguably the single most important biological event in the history of this planet.

Modern-day origins theories spring from the 1924 writings of Russian plant biochemist A.I. Oparin who claimed chemicals on early earth assembled themselves into amino acids, which became the building blocks of proteins, which are the building blocks of a cell. But floors, walls and ceilings do not make a home, they merely make a house. For a building to become something useful it needs systems, such as electrical, plumbing and heating, plus intelligence to make things work.

Today, Oparin’s 77-year old “brick and mortar” ideas have become woven into a scavenger hunt for parts. But what those hunters miss is that Tinker Toys? and Erector Sets? – like generators and gearboxes, and even more like amino acids and proteins – do not assemble themselves.

Before we dissect Oparin’s theory, we recognize that each living cell, from an ant to an aunt, is composed of four elements: Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen and Nitrogen. All cells require C, H, O and N, but some require also a few other elements such as sulfur, phosphorous, iron and such.

Darwinists’ origins scenario

Billions of years ago, so the story goes, CHON jostled about in Darwin’s warm little pond until they inexplicably clung together in a three-dimensional form called a brick – in cell-talk, an amino acid.

Amino acids are complex structures that come in 20 different colors. For example, lysine contains C6H14N2O2. The likelihood of lysine forming itself by random chance, is equal to the odds of tossing 24 jigsaw puzzle pieces in the air and seeing them fall to form a completed puzzle.

A million years later, so the story goes, anywhere from 40 to thousands of bricks phenomenally stacked themselves together. In cell-talk, this stack is called a protein – which makes up feathers, muscles, hair, blood, nerves, fish scales, and every part of every living thing. The odds of amino acids stacking themselves into proteins are one to the number of atoms in the universe – a number so monstrous as to make this event not only mathematically improbable but impossible.

Millions of years later, stacks of bricks supposedly sloshed around until tens of thousands of them suddenly, and even more spectacularly, assembled themselves into a brick building (a cell) and the evolutionist exclaims, “Voila! There’s life!”

Well, not so fast. That cell is no more life than was the human skeleton that hung in front of my anatomy classroom. Every casket in the cemetery is full of bricks (amino acids), stacks of bricks (proteins), and buildings (cells) – yet no one walked out this morning.

In Darwin’s day a cell was thought to be a little chunk of protoplasm in a sac. Today, scientists who study billion-year-old cells surprise us by saying they are remarkably like modern-day cells. And, molecular biologists, who peel away layers of the cell, find not merely a chunk of protoplasm but a teeming city.

What’s inside a cell?

For one, a clock that ticks in nanoseconds, i.e., one billion ticks in one second, so that this clock-watching cell may time every procedure that occurs within its walls. We see a computer that experts claim surpasses the most sophisticated computer man can envision. We find a wealth of data, as much information as is found in the New York City Public Library – 52 million volumes. This inside a cell so small we cannot see it with the naked eye.

From the instant First Cell came alive, it ate by opening thousands of portholes on its skin – each wired to the cell’s computer. With nutrients trapped inside, the cell messaged its chemical factory to produce thousands of stacks of amino acids, a.k.a. digestive enzymes. Digested food then either fueled cell activity or was stored; and the remainder was expelled as waste.

First Cell knew how to repair worn protein walls and how to build outboard motors – in cell-talk, flagella. It could move and it knew why it needed to move.

And more remarkably than any other attribute, First Cell could make another cell in some few nanoseconds. Its daughter cell had the same computers, with complex software and databank, the same furnace, storage bins, portholes, chemical plant, machine shop and manufacturing plant. And this new bit of life had one more precious asset: It could miraculously reproduce itself.

The odds of this vast complexity arising from a few inert elements are astronomically impossible. And now you know why evolutionists do not want to talk about the entire first half of their theory. The origin of the First Cell of life is the Little Secret that sprang from Darwin’s warm little pond, even though it is absurdly improbable that First Cell ever did.

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Dr. Schmidt has spent his professional career in the applied life sciences of the practice of dentistry. For the past 35 years, he has studied Darwin’s theory of evolution and now writes from the perspective of what he calls “kitchen table science,” or science for those who have not spent their lives immersed in any of science’s many disciplines. Dr. Schmidt’s next book will be published early in 2002, titled: “First They Want Our Children: How Darwinism Seeks to Rule Our Schools.”